When I was a kid, my dad would often take my brother and me with him while he ran his Saturday errands. Sometimes one of the stops was the local garage. More often than not, this particular stop was a social one, so to placate his two young boys and buy off our patience while he jabbered, my father would let us each have a bottle of soda from the big, red, bulbous Coke vending machine. Since then, Coke and other vending machines have slimmed down and gotten pretty sophisticated, and it turns out that there are other things happening in the 130 year-old vending industry that some liken to a mini-renaissance.

A while ago, a marketing friend of mine described how every service business operates via a framework made from three components: speed, accuracy and value. He also explained that any customer of said service business can never get all three components simultaneously. I’m not sure I agree.